The present invention generally relates to electronic power regulation and, more particularly, to voltage-controlled lamp dimming and luminance matching of light emitting diodes (LED) to incandescent bulbs.
While incandescent bulbs are widely known for many lighting applications, there are many uses for which the use of light emitting diodes provides significant advantages due, for example, to the greater durability, cost effectiveness, longer life, reliability, and light generating efficiency along with the lower heat generation and power consumption of LEDs in comparison with incandescent lights. LEDs have been found to be particularly useful, for example, in aircraft cockpits and automobile dashboards for such applications as illuminated switches, lighted control panels, displays, legends, and indicators. Control panels for aircraft and other vehicles often provide a control dimming switch that allows the pilot or driver to manually dim the display, for example, to match night vision conditions or to otherwise adjust the display visibility, e.g., for personal preference.
For a display having both incandescent and LED illumination, consistent dimming of the entire display from a single controller switch may be achieved if each of the lights has similar brightness characteristics. The luminance, or brightness, level of LEDs is different, however, from that of incandescent lights given the same input voltage or input current. Therefore, to provide consistent dimming from a single control dimming switch requires some form of input power (either voltage or current) compensation among the different types of lighting used for the display. Even for displays in which all incandescent lighting has been replaced by LEDs or for newly designed displays with all LED illumination, it may be desirable for the response of the control dimming switch to mimic that of the familiar incandescent lit display by using some form of compensation to match the luminance characteristics of LEDs to those of incandescent lighting. For example, the unintentional emission of light by LEDs can be a problem, since LEDs—unlike incandescent lamps—have the potential to produce detectable levels of illumination with as little as a few microamperes of current. Since some electronic devices—such as aircraft avionic equipment coupled to aircraft control panel display elements—have inherent current at levels at least that high, the display elements may be unintentionally illuminated. By compensating the input power to LEDs, the low power level characteristics of incandescent light (e.g., requiring a minimum positive power input before illumination is detectable) could be mimicked so that unintentional control panel illumination is avoided.
As can be seen, there is a need for input power compensation for luminance matching for different types of lighting. There is also a need for consistent dimming of different types of lighting from a single control dimming switch. Moreover, there is a need for luminance compensation for LEDs that avoids unintentional illumination of the LEDs.